Mail.app vs. Entourage
When I made the move to Panther, I decided I'd give Apple's Mail.app a shot because I wanted the tighter integration with the OSX Address Book, and the new threading feature looked compelling.
What follows are my thoughts after roughly a month in Mail.
In short, I still prefer Entourage. There are lots of little things in Mail that annoy me that add up to a lot of frustration.
* Adding a rule involves too many mouse clicks. You should be able to configure rules from the application menu, not a subsection of the preferences dialog.
* The new "threaded" view is flaky. Sometimes when you click on an entry in the thread, Mail stops recognizing your clicks. You then have to click on another mail message in another thread and back again to get it to work.
* When you reply to e-mail, Mail places your cursor at the top. I hate "top-posting" and prefer to make my reply comments appear appropriately in the body of the original message. There is no preference in Mail to switch this behavior.
* My dock is on auto-hide, and getting Mail to bounce the dock icon is an exercise in frustration. If you have multiple rules set up, and the last one is a catch-all spam rule, then you have to manually add "bounce the dock icon" to each non-spam rule. Worse, if you get mail when Mail is at the forefront, the icon will bounce, and you'll have to switch Mail to the background and back to the foreground to get the icon to stop bouncing.
* I had Entourage set up to color various eBay auction e-mails (red for not paid, blue for paid and not received, green for paid and received). With Mail, I can either flag an e-mail or not. There is no middle ground.
So right now, I'm kinda regretting switching to Mail, but I'll stick with it for a little while longer. I've noticed that my e-mail archives when imported from Entourage are huge (1.8 gigs), and they're uncompressed. I wish Mail had a means to store e-mail a little more efficiently, but I can live with the standard mbox format. Hopefully Apple will continue to refine Mail and give it some much needed usability attention.
One dark horse that I'm watching is GNUMail.app. It's an open-source Mail-like client. It's not nearly as robust or polished as Mail or Entourage, but with some love and attention, it could get there.
Comments
to make the icon bounce when mail is received, you can set a single rule that consists of:
If [ANY] of the following conditions are met:
[Every Message]
Perform the following actions:
[Bounce Icon In Dock]
Posted by: clay | August 19, 2004 10:05 AM
Hi Clay,
That rule would indeed bounce the icon in the dock fairly easily. However, it would also bounce the icon whenver I receive junk mail, which is definitely not what I want, since i receive and filter a ton of that a day compared to my non-junk mail.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | August 20, 2004 12:05 AM